Richmond, California poet Rusty Morrison’s fifth trade poetry collection is Beyond the Chainlink (Boise ID: Ahsahta
Press, 2013), a collection that opens with the extended title/sub-title “BEYOND
THE CHAINLINK, A CITY / IS THE UNION BETWEEN TWO LOVERS, // NEVER TAKING PLACE[.]”
The poems in Beyond the Chainlink display
a fantastic collage of meditative connections and self-contained moments,
working an incredible tension between connection and disconnect, blended in
such a way that the differences disappear. “The body is a sky falling.” she writes,
to open the poem “Sensework.” Many of the poems reference the body and a lack
of control, as well as a will to re-claim the body. Another poem with the same
title, further on in the collection, asks, “How to amass the body’s losses, //
link its deities together?” As she writes in her extended bio (included on the publisher’s website), Morrison’s poems attempt to stretch out beyond the scope of
her current reach, extending out for the sake of collecting ideas, experience
and knowledge, from the loss of her parents, to the fact that she lives “with a
chronic illness that has challenged and changed me.” It would seem that the
entire collections works through a sequence of changes, both attempting and
accepting various changes, and articulating the spaces those changes require. Given
that the short lyrics in each of her three sections share numerous titles, this
is the author working to return, rework and explore similar territories
throughout, composing poems that subsequently move deeper into the subjects of
body, possibility and perception. In her author’s statement (also included online), she writes:

In Beyond the Chainlink I want to be honest about my dishonesties—the unreality
in my truths and the truth of my unreality. I want to trust the useful disarray
of dis-believing what I am sure of—to
examine the ways I’m in two places at once. Of course, a preposition like “beyond”
is exquisitely skilled at this (bringing attention to both here and not here)—though
we hardly notice.

Beyond the Chainlink is a study
of small moments, discursive leaps, historical lineages and connections that
manage to bridge incredible gaps, such as in the poem “History is hidden in
fact,” that opens: “There was milk in our cruelty. / This was wasteful. // This
mistake might find a breeze stirring dry leaves / on the sidewalk. // Here is
the egg to fertilize, / not dominated by gesture. // This mistake will not be
made / the same way twice.” The poems in Beyond
the Chainlink play entirely with perception, whether the reader’s, or the
author’s own, shifting and questioning, and showing just how wrong it might
have been to expect a certain line to automatically follow another. Listen to
this couplet from the poem “History of seed,” where she writes “Not the task of
illusion. / Just tamp down this soft, fleshy moistened soil.” Or, in one of the
poems titled “Backyard rowing,” where she opens: “We were talking about the
unfinishable, / not the unfinished.” There are shifting sands, especially once
we think, as readers, we’ve finally discovered our feet. As she explains in the
poem “History of sleep,” early on in the collection, that includes: “How a
second emptiness / un-punctuates the first.”